"Bumptious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him and visited at Lord Melville's and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have "bumptious notions," and his head was "somewhat turned with fine people"; as to some extent it remained throughout his innocent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (and the inevitabilities of close, though temporary, daily contact), while admitting that her manner and manners were beautiful, had to admit also that she was an extremely difficult young person "to get to know". A gilt-edged, bumptious young subalternknut, who commenced the voyage apoplectically full of self-admiration, self-confidence, and admiring wonder at his enormous attractiveness, importance, and value, finished the same in a ludicrously deflated condition—and a quiet civilian, to whom the cub had been shamefully insolent, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... as not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed in. I closed the door behind me before I began to speak. He listened, at first amazed, then disconcerted, then angry, and then cowering down like a whipped hound. I felt that it was a case for speaking out. A bumptious ass like him, who deliberately insulted everyone he came across—for if all or any of his efforts in that way were due to mere elemental ignorance he was not fit to live, but should be silenced on sight as a modern Caliban—deserved neither pity ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... the world file past, one with the odd word 'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'—this with a particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other smaller bodies of nobodies, ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... earthquake, said, "It is when the 'arth shug itself, and swallow up the 'arth"; and there was his schoolmate, who said that "America was discovered by British Columbia." There was old Mullinger of Earl Soham, who thought it "wrong of fooks to go up in a ballune, as that fare {33} so bumptious to the Almighty." There was the actual balloon, which had gone up somewhere in the West of England, and which came down in (I think) the neighbouring parish of Bedfield. As it floated over Monk Soham, the ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... A bumptious colored person wearing a derby tipped over one eye, and a cigar in his mouth pointing to the northwest, walked into a hardware-store and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... the way we'll have it," said Tim Fisher. He eyed James somewhat ruefully. "You know, it's a funny thing. I've always thought this was a screwy set-up, and to be honest, I've always thought you were a pretty bumptious kid. I guess you had a good reason. Anyway, I should have known Janet wouldn't have played along with it unless she had a reason that was ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... and a few minutes later was shown into a private salon more appropriate to a beautiful young duchess than to a middle-aged, bumptious financier. It was pale green and white, full of lilies and fragrance, and an immense French window opened out upon a roofed loggia overlooking the Nile. This would have been the ideal environment for our Gilded Rose; and I felt more venomous than before, if possible, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... trembling steps along the slimy pathway between the Falls and the rock, to gaze on the sun through the roaring and rolling flood; nor will I draw upon your nerves by a detail of the hair-breadth escapes of Mr. Bumptious and Mrs. Positive, who, when they got half-way along the said path, were seized with panic, and only escaped a header into the boiling caldron by lying flat on their stomachs until the rest of the party had lionized the whole distance, when the guide returned and hauled them out by ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... chief citizen was seized by the bumptious, gilt-braided British officials, there was a merry uproar. All the men in the shipyards quit work, and the Calkers' Club, of which Samuel Adams was secretary, passed hot resolutions and revolutionary preambles ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the most notorious of all the Simeonites. Not only was he ugly, dirty, ill-dressed, bumptious, and in every way objectionable, but he was deformed and waddled when he walked so that he had won a nick-name which I can only reproduce by calling it "Here's my back, and there's my back," because the lower parts of his ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... into the sacred circle of friends, or launching her on the waters of their little world. Now, as they chatted, she said to herself again that if Mrs. Hawthorne's homeliness of phrase were not a simple thing of playfulness, a disclaimer of the affectation of elegance in talk as stilted, bumptious, unsuited to a proper modesty, it could very well pass for that. Mrs. Hawthorne seldom expressed herself quite seriously. As she seldom looked serious either, one could hardly hear her say it was the loveliest party ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... curtain fall Upon the works of men! Nothing they did that's worth recall, With sword, or spade, or pen. Their bumptious bunglings bring not back! Man always was a noisy quack Who thought himself a god; But when he fancied he had scored Prodigiously, the Sex he bored Subdued him with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various
... faults, but there was no comparison between him and the Andersonville commandant. He was a typical young Southern man; ignorant and bumptious as to the most common matters of school-boy knowledge, inordinately vain of himself and his family, coarse in tastes and thoughts, violent in his prejudices, but after all with some streaks of honor and generosity that made ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... prepared to find his old schoolfellow ungrammatical and bumptious, but he was not prepared to find him peevish. Athletes, he believed, were simple, straightforward people, cruel and brutal if you like, but never petty. They knocked you down and hurt you, and then went on their way rejoicing. For this, Rickie thought, there is something to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... intends to have him shot. Lord Cromer is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is enormously more popular than the moral babble (Milton's phrase) of his sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious and jolly Junker, just as Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the list. In these islands the Junker is literally all ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Mac, you're merely bumptious. I was like that when I first came to London. I had noble ideals, but I very soon discovered that the other high-minded men were not quite so idealistic as I was. I know one high-souled fellow who went into a newspaper office and asked to be allowed to review a novel with the express ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... atmosphere about this book which is extremely pleasant. Mr. Quilter is entirely free from affectation of any kind. He rollicks through art with the recklessness of the tourist and describes its beauties with the enthusiasm of the auctioneer. To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British. Mr. Quilter is the apostle of the middle classes, and we are glad to welcome his gospel. After listening so long to the Don Quixote of art, to listen once to Sancho Panza is both ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... K'yengo's. Mtesa, he said, was so mad to see us, that the instant he arrived at the palace and told him we wished to visit him, the king caused "fifty big men and four hundred small ones" to be executed, because, he said, his subjects were so bumptious they would not allow any visitors to come near him, else he would have ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the creature are such as to establish the delusion that it is not altogether amicable in its attitude towards even such a bumptious and authoritative product of Nature as man. Its agitated demonstrations—whatever their vital purpose may be—to the superficial observer are danger signals, a means of self-preservation, as a substitute for the hard calcareous armour bestowed ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... out personally by the officers, and this as much as the genuine democracy of the men in command has served to break down the suspicious or surly spirit of the French peasant on his first service, to win over the bumptious industrial, and even to subdue the militant anarchist and predatory Apache. This was Mlle. Javal's idea, and has solved a problem for many an ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... class who seldom or never voted before will vote now, and the greater part of the new voters will in the main be wiser as to their electoral responsibilities and more seriously desirous to discharge them for the common good than the bumptious singers of "Rule Britannia," "Our dear old Church of England," and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... constantly metaphorizing. Knock at the door of anything met which interests, and ask, 'Who lives here?' The process is to look, then close the eyes, then look within." The blundering inanity of this kind of writing is equaled only by its bumptious grandiloquence. On p. 137 Dr. Townsend quotes this wholesome admonition from Coleridge: "If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be!" As an example of reportorial highfalutin, I submit the following: "The ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... said Byrne, between his set teeth, because a bumptious agent sought to lay forceful hands upon the daughter of a chief. Poor Daly! He had paid dearly for that essay. As for Natzie, and her shadow Lola, neither one had been again seen. They might indeed have dropped back from Montezuma Well ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King |
